[Feature Request] Excluding children NPCs as Questors.

[harbinger451]

Having the child NPCs as quest givers brings up various odd requests ... them challenging you to a duel, or asking you to rescue their child kidnapped by the Dark Brotherhood, or them owning a house that's going to be ransacked, or them wanting to marry their betrothed etc. All these events are out of place and immersion breaking.

Would it be possible to disable the Children faction as questors in a future update of DFUnity?

I should point out that my asking is not purely altruistic, I recently released a Prostitutes And Lovers Quest Pack that allows NPCs in the Commoner and Nobility social groups to proposition the Player ... unfortunately this brings up the rather unpalatable possibility of a child propositioning the player too - something I did not intend. I could try scripting this myself and release the quests as a dfmod (something I have no clue how to do at this poin,t but was going to look into antway once I mastered quest writing), but who knows how long that might take.

This may also be a problem for anyone else who brings out an adult oriented questpack in the future ... so I just thought I might save some time by getting those that know what they're doing to change it in the base game.

[Hazelnut]

I think this would be pretty easy to do, but it's a change from classic so I'd like to know how Interkarma feels about it first? Change it, leave as classic, or have an option?

[Ah_Ftagn]

I personally think that if this is actually going to be "altered", making it a toggle is necessary. The issue is more than just a change from classic daggerfall behavior...

Up until well into the industrial age (and the passing of laws against child labor and employment of children in, for example, factories), children didn't exactly get to have a period of innocence once they started understanding what adults were talking about.

A kid with enough money (say, nobility) was likely going to be groomed to rule, which meant a lot of ugly truths were taught to them early on, such as the need to hire assassins to end sieges for example, or the necessity of sending armies to suppress revolt in order to hang onto power, or the knowledge that sometimes, people would have to die to get what they needed to improve their position among the nobility.

A child of a peasant was exposed to death, financial hardship, starvation, disease, cruelty of those in power, and the fact that nobility were often treated favorably in the legal systems of fuedal societies, giving them near total freedom to terrorize or harm those who were not themselves nobility, or at least (as fuedalism began crumbling in the face of commerce) lacked the money to protect themselves and buy influence.

This isn't even counting the fact that an orphaned child may actually have the money from continued criminal acts (or be used as a go between by criminals ) that would lead to them being used to hire assassins and give dark brotherhood quests, for example.

Even in the post-1999 days where the innocence of children is an expected quality in video games even where it makes little sense that they not have to grow up fast (and children are a protected class of NPC), Skyrim's dark brotherhood quests begin with a child paying you to kill a cruel orphanage matron. While Todd Howard screwed up much of the setting in my opinion with Oblivion and Skyrim, this is one thing I think he actually "Got" - Being orphaned and then sent by adult authority to a place of torment and hopelessness robs a child of innocence, and this is a "normal" event in a world with even an optimistic take on pre-industrial society could realistically be.

Simply put, I think it's more realistic to let the children act like adult questgivers in this instance, since the hardships of this kind of world kind of support that. If you don't want that to be a thing, It's something that should either be added as a feature, or be modded in (And if it isn't capable of being modded in, the feature to be added is the groundwork to let mods do that)



Side note: A good in-between method might be the creation of a mod that does this (adding scripting features to the game to allow it to be possible if necessary), and packaging it with the core game (toggled off by default), along with documentation on how it was made being part of whatever tools were used to make it. This could open the doors up to mods that could gatekeep specific dialogue and quests based on who the questgiver appeared to be, maybe even features that could gatekeep stuff in other interfaces... like making houses something you can't buy if you have less than a certain low-but-positive amount of local reputation.



The Stability Issue: Making this a "feature" baked into the core game might make it cause compatibility issues with mods that every single mod that affects those NPCs will have to work around, since this would mean two versions of the same script exist and a mod would need to be able to tell if the feature was enabled, AND program for both possible states. I'm not a programmer or modder myself, but I DO know that version or file mismatches between a game and something that modifies it can cause serious bugs and stability issues...

even a mod that relies upon another mod can cause bugs or crashes, after the pre-requisite mod is updated. I had to disable one such mod because it crashed the game due to a mod version mismatch between itself (Helmet Swap Mod, DREAM edition) and the prerequisite mod (DREAM).

Two built in versions of something probably means that if version B is used when a mod expects version A, then something bad happens, simply put.

[Jay_H]

Taking all realism into account, this kind of content is ultra-mega-banned from any gaming that sees sunlight. There are no mods that sexualize children in TES1-5 for this precise reason -- not because it isn't possible or easy, but because IRL legal systems would rain hellfire on anyone who tries it.

[Ralzar]

One quick and dirty way to fix this in a mod for now: Include replacement sprites for all children sprites where you just put adult daggerfall sprites instead.
This wil remove all children from the game though.

[harbinger451]

Removing all children from the game seems a bit like the nuclear option, after all, they do add some depth and realism to the world. Having them in the pool of commoner questors though (are there any noble children?) is the bit that causes the problems. even before you take my quest pack into consideration they were giving innappropriate and illogical quests. I get the feeling that in classic they were left in as questors more as an oversight than a feature.

Like the prostitutes and the bards, it seems they were included with the intention of developing them as a faction and were probably going to have their own quests. But, for whatever reason, this didn't happen and they were just lumped in to the general pool of commoner questors instead. That works fine with the prostitutes and bards because they are adults, but not the children.

There are no specific children quests so its not like we'll loose out on any quests by removing them as questors. And it seems this change would have the least impact on the game. removing them entirely and replacing with adult sprites is a much bigger change from classic IMO. And, aren't at least some children required as quest NPCs (not questors) to be rescued by the player here and there?

[Lokkrin Zhataros]

I played with the Prostitutes And Lovers Quest Pack a bit last week. I did get 1 'request' from a child npc. For now I will not be using the mod within my game till this issue is sorted out.

Since the two main methods of solving the issue (creating a child faction or simply excluding child npcs from offering quests) seems it would take some extra time to implement, personally I'm willing to settle for 'replacing child sprites' for now. Maybe it is a bit inconvenient, but I'm not so hard-core about realism that I can't temporarily make a compromise when it concerns a rather serious issue and I still want to use adult-themed mods.

Agreeing with what harbinger451 mentioned, classic Daggerfall is already broken and immersion/realism breaking when a child...

asking you to rescue their child kidnapped by the Dark Brotherhood, or them owning a house that's going to be ransacked, or them wanting to marry their betrothed etc.

So I'm guessing that if this problem isn't fixed within DFU itself, it will continue to be problematic for other adult-themed mods.

[Ralzar]

One thing a mod perhaps could do is to, on entering a building it could check all sprites. If any of them are set as questors and a child sprite, change the sprite?
Not something I've tested doing but it sounds somewhat doable.

[Interkarma]

I think this would be pretty easy to do, but it's a change from classic so I'd like to know how Interkarma feels about it first? Change it, leave as classic, or have an option?

I feel fine about it. To start with we just need a bool property that can be raised by mods. If true then children don't offer quests, simple as that. Then harbinger451 can set bool at startup and children are excluded from offering any problematic quests.

If this gets refined later to allow some quests and not others, then great. But the main issue here is obvious and should be overcome sooner rather than later.

Hazelnut, would you be able to allocate a bit of time on this one mate? If not, I'll add on the weekend before preparing releases.

Edit: harbinger451 - I haven't looked at your mod yet. Are you using C# scripts where you'll be able to set a property in game? If not, we'll conceive another solution. It's important to me this is something the mod can control, not something users have to remember to switch off themselves. A settings.ini toggle isn't suitable here.

[Ralzar]

If this gets refined later to allow some quests and not others, then great. But the main issue here is obvious and should be overcome sooner rather than later.

Yeah, this could be a pretty handy thing for the quest system to have. The completely random assignment of commoner quests in particular leads to a lot of weird situations. Which is amusing but a bit immersion breaking at times.